The reality is somewhat different than the official administration account. Jerusalem has long been looking to mend relations with its one-time strategic ally in Ankara. Contrary to popular narrative, it was Erdogan who was intransigent—not Netanyahu. Nor was Obama the prime mover here, “prodding” the Israeli prime minister to do his bidding. If anything, it was Netanyahu who used the commander in chief as something like a blunt instrument to force Erdogan to accept the same deal that his government had first put on the table at least 18 months prior: Israel would apologize; it would pay compensation; but it would not, as Erdogan had demanded, end the maritime blockade of the strip.

From Netanyahu’s perspective, it’s all to the good that Obama is getting the credit for the reconciliation. Bibi got what he wanted from Erdogan and gave Obama a big trophy to put on his shelf. The Turkish premier, despite his bluster, has little choice but to swallow it, and the American president now owes Bibi a favor. Netanyahu—often denigrated as a clumsy politician and preachy ideologue—is in fact a much more adroit statesman than he is typically believed to be.(Read more…)

Jabotinsky got it –102 years ago

Ze’ev Jabotinsky with wife Yohana and son Eri

We know that “history is written by the victors,” and until recently much of Israel’s history was written by the Left. Begin, Jabotinsky and others were treated as marginal, extremist figures, sometimes even vilified by the socialist establishment.

Israel underwent a political revolution in 1977 with the election of its first right-wing government, led by Menachem Begin, although vestiges of the old leftist establishment hung on in the arts, academia and media. Maybe for that reason the historical record is still unfair to Begin — whom some believe to have been the greatest of Israel’s Prime Ministers — and to Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, a remarkably prescient thinker and philosopher of Zionism. (Read more…)

Ted Belman. The authors postulate that “Contrary to popular belief, the core of the conflict is not borders, Israeli settlements, or the status of Jerusalem.” but the right of return. I beg to differ. Even if the right of return was abandoned by the Palestinians or they accept Obama’s demand that they accept Israel as a Jewish state, they would in fact be abandoning it. Then the chances of Israel agreeing to a divided Jerusalem and uprooting 100,000 Jews east of the greenline, are less than the chances of the Palestinians abandoning the right of return.

Mind you, if Netanyahu could apologize for Mavi Marmara, he could agree to dividing Jerusalem and uprooting over 100,000 Jews.

With the completion of Barack Obama’s first Presidential visit to Israel, as expected there was a great deal of symbolism reinforcing the bond between the two allies. Yet still, doves on both sides acknowledge that peace is hardly around the corner.

Understanding the true barriers to a comprehensive agreement is key to knowing where the pressure to compromise will be coming from. Contrary to popular belief, the core of the conflict is not borders, Israeli settlements, or the status of Jerusalem.(Read more…)

One of the biggest complaints of the Syrian regime against the involvement of Qatar in Syria during the past two years is that the Emir of Qatar has been utilizing all of his wealth in fighting the wrong enemy: instead of fighting Israel, which is the true problem of Arabs and Muslims, the Emir of Qatar uses his strength and wealth in a fight against the “resistance” regimes, mainly Syria and Libya, who take a strong stand against Israel and Zionism. Qatar does not usually respond to accusations of this sort, because everyone knows that Israel has always been used to hide the real problems of the Arab and Muslim world, which center around corrupt, rotten, cruel and illegitimate regimes.(Read more…)

The smoke was still rising as Rabbi Herschel Schacter rode through the gates of Buchenwald.

It was April 11, 1945, and Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army had liberated the concentration camp scarcely an hour before. Rabbi Schacter, who was attached to the Third Army’s VIII Corps, was the first Jewish chaplain to enter in its wake.(Read more…)

On Feb. 28, at a meeting of something called the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations, Turkey ‘s Prime Minister Tacip Erdogan called Zionism “a crime against humanity.” Another day, another vicious slur on Israel , in this case from the leader of a country that only yesterday had been its strategic ally in the region. All that was unusual was that this one actually drew a comment from Secretary of State John Kerry — “objectionable” — after it was exposed by the private monitoring group U.N. Watch, awkwardly for Kerry at the very time he was visiting Turkey . The episode underscores the worldwide no-holds-barred attack on Israel ‘s legitimacy and how little push-back this meets from Israel herself.

A number of articles have appeared recently lamenting Israel ‘s public relations failures. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes in The Jerusalem Post on Jan. 7, “What good is having Apache helicopter gunships, or Merkava tanks, to defend your citizens against attack if you can’t even use them because the world thinks you’re always the aggressor?” On Jan. 11, in the same paper, Barry Shaw, author of “Israel — Reclaiming the Narrative,” says, “government-wise, we are barely on the battlefield for hearts and minds, while the Palestinians and their supporters seem to have endless resources and are succeeding to win the world away from us.”(Read more…)

To many, the picture of a crying Arab father lifting his lifeless infant toward the sky will remain an image epitomizing Israeli injustice during the aggression initiated by Hamas in November 2012. The BBC reporter’s photograph depicting this personal tragedy has received an enormous amount of international attention leading to an almost unconditional outcry against the rules of engagement used by the IDF during Operation Pillar of Defense. Little has been said when a UN-mandated investigation concluded that the death of the young kid had been caused by a rocket misfired by Hamas that was originally aimed at Israeli civilian populations.(Read more…)

On Monday night, as Jews around the world sat down for the first seder of the Passover holiday, anti-Zionists in the United Kingdom and elsewhere held a very different celebration to mark the comprehensive dismissal of a discrimination case brought by Ronnie Fraser, a Jewish math teacher, to an employment tribunal in London.(Read more…)